A History of Coffee

Cemal Kafadar
Harvard University, U.S.A.

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There is a danger that the history of coffee may lead us astray. The anecdotal, the
picturesque, and the unreliable play an enormous part in it.
F. Braudel
Pecevi, an Ottoman historian of the early seventeenth century, writes: Until the year 962
(1554-55), in the High, God-Guarded city of Constantinople, as well as in Ottoman lands
generally, coffee and coffeehouses did not exist. About that year, a fellow called Hakam from
Aleppo and a wag called Shams from Damascus, came to the city: they each opened a large shop
in the district called Tahtalkala, and began to purvey coffee. These shops became meeting places
of a circle of pleasure seekers and idlers, and also of some wits from among the men of letters
and literati, and they used to meet in groups of 20 or 30. Some read books and fine writings,
some were busy with backgammon and chess, some brought new poems and talked of literature.
Those who used to spend a good deal of money on giving dinners for the sake of convivial
entertainment, found that they could attain the joys of conviviality merely by spending an asper
or two on the price of coffee. It reached such a point that all kinds of unemployed officers,
judges and professors, all seeking preferment, and corner-sitters with nothing to do proclaimed
that there was no place like it for pleasure and relaxation, and filled it until there was no room to
sit or stand. It became so famous that, besides the holders of high offices, even great men could
not refrain from coming there. The imams and muezzins and pious hypocrites said: People have
become addicts of the coffeehouse: nobody comes to the mosques! The ulema said: It is a
house of evil deeds; it is better to go to the wine tavern than there. The preachers in particular
made great efforts to forbid it. The muftis arguing that anything which is heated to the point of
carbonization, that is becomes charcoal, is unlawful, issued fetvas against it. In the time of
Sultan Murad III, may God pardon him and have mercy on him, there were great interdictions

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and prohibitions, but certain persons made approaches to the chief of police and the captain of
the watch about selling coffee from back-doors in side-alleys, in small and unobstrusive shops
and were allowed to do this. After this time, it became so prevalent that the ban was abandoned.
The preachers and muftis now said that it does not become completely carbonized, and to drink it
is therefore lawful. Among scholars of religion, the sheikhs, the viziers, and the great, there was
nobody left who did not drink it. It even reached such a point that the grand viziers built great
coffeehouses as investments and began to rent them out at one or two gold pieces a day.

Almost all the themes one would need to cover in dealing with the history of coffee and
coffeehouses are underscored here: new and immensely popular forms of sociability in the early
modern era; secularization of public space; literary activity; novel sites for the formation and
manipulation of public opinion; tensions with the authorities; coffee as a commodity, driven to
significance by growing demand and supply, and the coffeehouse as an investment. Pecevi could
limit his account to the Ottoman realm, from Yemen to Hungary, but already in his lifetime the
buzz of coffee was spreading as a part of daily life both eastward to Iran and India and westward
to Europe, with the opening of coffeehouses in Isfahan, Delhi, Oxford, Paris, Vienna, and many
other cities before the end of the 17th century. This paper will deal with the latter theme of
coffee and coffeehouse (or, caf) as part of a global history of trade from the 16th to the 19th
century as well as some of its repercussions in social and political life.

By the time it reached Istanbul, coffee had been known in the certain parts of the Arab
world (the Arabian peninsula, late Mamluk Egypt and Syria) for more than a century. The

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earliest reports on the consumption of coffee associate it with different mystical figures, and in
each case with their concern with wakefulness. A Cairene historian relates:
At the beginning of this [the 16th] century, the news reached us in Egypt that a
drink, called qahwa, had spread in Yemen and was being used by Sufi shaykhs
and others to help them stay awake during their devotional exercises ... Then it
reached us, some time later, that its appearance and spread there had been due to
the efforts of the learned shaykh, imam, mufti and Sufi .... al-Dhabhani ... He
found that among its properties was that it drove away fatigue and lethargy, and
brought to the body a certain sprightliness and vigor.
The early consumption of this invigorating liquor seems to have been limited at first to
Sufi confraternities, homes, and small street stalls. When coffee reached Cairo and Istanbul,
however, trendsetter cities of huge populations and prestige, some merchants of the bean took an
imaginative entrepreneurial step and created an institution for its consumption in a social setting.
And a trend was indeed set, as coffeehouses spread like wildfire all around the empire.

As a consumer good, coffee hardly knew any social boundaries. Thevenot, who stayed in
Istanbul in 1655, noted that the Constantinopolitans deemed coffee to have medicinal properties,
and added: There is no one poor or rich, who does not drink at least two or three cups a day.
All sorts of people come to these places, [i.e., the coffeehouses] without distinction of religion or
social position; there is not the slightest bit of shame in entering such a place, and many go there
simply to chat with one another.

It should be noted, however, that when Thevenot speaks of there being not the slightest
bit of shame in entering such a place, he is speaking only of men. Coffeehouses were, in the
Middle East and the Balkans, and for a while after its introduction in various parts of Europe,
male spaces. It takes a perceptive and gender-conscious observer like Lady Montague, wife of

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the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire in the early 18th century, to see that Ottoman
women, too, loved to sip at the cup; moreover, they were as concerned as men with conviviality
and found ways to meet similar social demands but in different institutions: the public
bathhouses, Lady Montague observed, serve as womens coffeehouses. A substantial part of
the demand for coffee was also for consumption at home, as coffee became a regular component
of breakfast.

Coffeehouses, however, constituted the primary source of demand, as indicated by the

sharp decline in customs revenues when these politically volatile institutions were banned by the
authorities (and by some of the pragmatic arguments made by those who wanted to revoke the
bans for fiscal reasons). Genders hardly mixed, but all sorts of men indeed, without distinction
of religion or social position, did visit coffeehouses. Over time, coffeeshops emerged with
specialized clientele: certain professions, groups, or regiments of the military were likely to have
their coffeehouses (adorned with the insignia of that specific regiment, for instance). Many
coffeehouses, however, at least the larger and centrally-located ones, attracted different sorts of
people. Ottoman-Jewish rabbi were compelled to answer questions such as whether coffee
prepared by gentiles was prohibited not only on the Sabbath but on the remaining days of the
week as well. Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra who resided in Egypt betw.1513-53, probably the
first to face such a question, saw no problem with the beverage being prepared by a non-Jew. ...
Coffeehouses, however, were for him another matter entirely: I do not consent to its being
drunk at a meeting place of non-Jews, ... if it is indeed for medicinal purposes one may send for
it and have it delivered home.

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It is not only the religio-ethnic composition of the patrons of coffeehouses but also the new
modes of sociability and patronage made possible by these institutions that transgressed the
social boundaries that the authorities of different communities would like to maintain. Some
members of the Ottoman elite lamented the fact that conspicuous patronage and ostentatious
hospitality had been rendered so inexpensive:
Those who used to spend a good deal of money on giving dinners for the sake of
convivial entertainment, found that they could attain the joys of conviviality merely by spending
an asper or two on the price of coffee.
To boot, the new modes of sociability facilitated by the coffeehouses were also secular, or
at least outside the direct control of the religious authorities. No such space existed before: the
taverns were not shunned by all of Muslim society, but their appeal was much more limited.
There was also the issue of sobriety and acceptability of coffee in general that alcoholic
beverages could not enjoy. Taverns simply did not represent a competition to the coffeehouses
in terms of the size of their clientele, either Muslim or non-Muslim.

Coffeehouses around the world also provided settings for and linkages to other sectors of
what one might call, admittedly somewhat anachronistically, the arts and entertainment industry.
Recitation of books, epics, romances spread over many nights like modern soap operas. Shadow
and puppet theater performers found ready and captive audiences there. London coffeeshops
also served art auctions and displays. Thevenot, a French traveler of the 17th century, observed
that generally in the coffeehouse [in the Orient] there are many violins, flute players, and
musicians, who are hired by the proprietor of the coffeehouse to play and sing much of the day,
with the end of drawing in customers. Card games, backgammon, and chess, as well as poetry
competitions, animated the same environment.

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Just as life in the coffeehouses must be understood in terms of various interlinked

activities, the consumption of coffee must be seen in terms of its linkages to various other
commodities. A jurist of the late-16th century was referring to opium and hashish when he
wrote: I was asked about coffee whether it is permitted and safe. I replied: yes, it is safe. The
only difficulty I have is with those additions to it. Not as an additive but as a companion to
coffee, and at least as addictive, tobacco emerged around the turn of the 17th century and became
immensely popular.

A poem composed in Arabic captures the intimate link people drew

between the two substances: tobacco without coffee is like sex without passion. As for its
introduction in Istanbul (the coming of the fetid and nauseating smoke of tobacco) as part of
the new patterns woven by merchants and rapid changes in demand experienced by consumers in
the early modern era, an Ottoman historian wrote that the English infidels brought it in the year
1009 (1601) and sold it as a remedy for certain diseases of humidity. Some companions from
among the pleasure seekers and sensualists said: Here is an occasion for pleasure. And they
became addicted. Soon those who were not mere pleasure-seekers also began to use it. Many,
even of the great ulema and the mighty fell into this addiction. From the ceaseless smoking of
the coffeehouse riffraff, the coffeehouses were filled with blue smoke, to such a point that those
who were in them could not see one another. By the beginning of the year 1045 A.H. (163536), its spread and fame are such as cannot be written or expressed.
Europes initial encounter with coffee was abroad, through travelers in Ottoman lands.
And some the earliest European observers of the coffee scene were, not surprisingly, physicians
since the medicinal properties of this new drink were to occupy the minds of many observers in
the east and the west from the functional level of its benefit and harm to the theoretical level of
classification according to Galenic humoralism. Sandys, an Englishman who visited Istanbul in

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the early 17th century, wrote: There they sit, chatting most of the day and sippe of a drink called
coffee, in little china dishes, as hot as they can suffer it: black as soote, and tasting not much
unlike it ... which [aide]th, as they say, digestion, and procureth alacritie. Or, Pietro della Valle,
famous Italian traveler who eventually boasted of being the first person to take coffee beans to
Europe, observed that consumers found it beneficial, primarily per la corroboratione della
stomaco e per la vigilanza della notte.
Starting around the middle of the 17th century, coffee became a temptation and then a habit
for Europeans as well. The apocryphal story of the caf in Vienna has it that the Ottoman
armies, in hasty retreat when the 1683 siege of Vienna turned into a disaster, left all their
belongings in the encampment, including bales of coffee. The Viennese are supposed thus to
have started brewing coffee and enjoying it with a croissant, as tokens of the victory over the
coffee-drinking Crescent. It breaks my heart to speak against such a well-spun tale, but we do
know that coffee was brought to Vienna and to Paris much before that by Armenian merchants.
Oxford, however, was probably the first town to have a coffeehouse (being a university town,
this is perfectly understandable). [Here, note will be taken also of coffees competition with tea
and chocolate.]
The growing European consumption of coffee eventually also implied changes in the
production and commerce of coffee. A good deal of the initial loss suffered by the merchants of
the Red Sea and Cairo in the spice trade, due to the circumnavigation of the southern tip of
Africa by Portuguese sailors, was in fact recovered by the arrival of coffee. The far-reaching
commercial ventures and sophisticated strategies of the coffee merchants of Cairo are richly
documented and indicate that Cairene merchants were making huge fortunes out of the growing

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demand for coffee from the late-16th to the mid-18th century. Dutch and English merchants also
became involved in the coffee trade from Yemen during the 17th century.
Throughout the late-17th and early-18th centuries, coffee was exported in large quantities
from the Middle East toward Europe.

Ever mindful of trade balances, mercantilists were

alarmed at the rising volume of coffee imports. By the 1710s, the Dutch were growing coffee
in Java for the European market and the French were [soon thereafter] even exporting coffee,
grown in their West Indian colonies, to the Ottoman empire. By 1739, West Indian coffee is
mentioned as far east as Erzurum in eastern Anatolia. Colonial coffee brought by Western
merchants was cheaper than that coming from the Red Sea and greatly reduced its share of the
market. As an imported commodity, coffee was soon joined by sugar, as the Ottomans took to
sweetening their coffee (possibly because non-Yemeni coffees were relatively bitter). The
political turmoil of Cairo in the late-18th century, that paved the way for Napoleon Bonapartes
invasion of Egypt in 1798, cannot be understood without coming to terms with the changes in the
production and marketing of coffee.
It took a long time for the authorities to take coffee lightly. Part of the reason was
directly political, and that part is better understood, but at least part of the tensions between the
authorities and the coffee-drinking public was related to the increasing use of the nighttime by
the latter. It would be foolish to argue that coffee is the factor behind the extension of human
activity and public sociability into the nighttime in the modern era, but coffee accompanied that
momentous change, and a fine companion to our modern tempo it has been. It made the morning
and the night more manipulable than they had ever been and thus served as a tool in the
colonization and conquest of the night that is part of the story of modernity and is still unfolding.
[I am currently working on developing some new data on the use of nighttime, such as changes

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in the production and consumption of candles and lighting oil, as well as governmental or
municipal efforts to increase street lighting. These will be presented if ready by July.]

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